Archived Articles
Things Unseen
To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all;
but to believe in the unseen is a triumph and a blessing.
Abraham Lincoln
If you were to go into the ocean and bring a fish a glass of water, it would look into the glass and say, “It’s empty”. It doesn’t distinguish the water because water is part of its customary environment. We too say the glass is empty when in reality it is filled with air.
In truth, things unseen are an every day part of our environment. In the world of astronomy, there are stars, planets, solar systems, asteroids, and all kinds of other spectacular things being photographed by the Hubble cameras. We certainly don’t see these in the daylight and most of them we cannot see in the night sky either. Then in the quantum world there are atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks….. All these things surround us constantly whether we are cognizant of them or not.
As a matter of fact, science now tells us that if you were to gather all the ordinary matter that comprises all the planets, solar systems, asteroids, comets quasars, etc. in the physical universe, it would only account for 4.9% of the total mass-energy. The remaining 95.1% is unknown, “unseen”, and so they call it dark matter and dark energy. Could this be like the water in the glass the fish couldn’t see or the air around us we do not see?
In actuality, we see only a very small part of the universe and the unseen world makes u the greater reality even though we don’t identify it. The effects of this unseen world however can be measured and scientists are doing just that and studying it in detail.
Given this information, isn’t it then reasonable to assume that we are part of and affected by this 95.1% of the unseen world? All along mankind has sensed that a part of us is not of the material world. In the series, “What makes me ‘ME’? we looked at the question of life from a philosophical perspective. The philosophers often referred to the soul. Could it also be that the affects of this unseen world now being studied by science are what mankind has throughout history attributed to soul, spirit, essence, life force, inner self, or even life itself?
As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially! As an example, the progression can be seen from simple celled organisms to prokaryotes to eukaryotes to worms to fish to mammals with many additional steps in between. This would be an example of an adaptation of Moore’s Law.
Gordon Moore is a co-founder of Intel. Simply stated, he observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit board doubled about every two years. So if they started with two transistors, by the second year they had four and by the fourth year they had eight and by the sixth year they had sixteen and so on.
The progression has been exponential. Interestingly, Moore’s Law or equivalent formulas can also be applied in the reverse. So today you could observe the current trend in transistors, work the formula backwards to discover the timeframe of the first transistors on the circuit board.
With a simple derivation of the formula, it isn’t difficult to see that current technological development in general is exponential, not just in computers, but in all things of a technical or even economic nature. But use of the formula or its equivalents also goes beyond the fields of technology and economics. Livinstone’s Law, developed in 1950, states that the energy of particle accelerators used by physicists will double in energy every two years. Dickerson’s Formula is biochemistry’s equivalent to Moore’s Law. It appears this exponential growth curve can be applied to many, many fields.
Returning to the example of the complexity of life, we know that scientists studying genomes are also using this law. Geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon suggest that life began before the earth since it hasn't had enough time to develop to it's current level if life began after the earth was formed.
Life Before Earth by Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon